To Kill A Mockingbird's digital release is victory for bookworms

HarperCollins US has today announced that Harper Lee has agreed
to let her novel To Kill a Mockingbird be published as an
ebook. The Pulitzer Prize-winning classic will finally be available
in digital format, as well as on digital audiobook, from 8
July.

"I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries,"
said Lee, who turns 88 today, in a statement issued by HarperCollins. "I am amazed and humbled
that Mockingbird has survived this long. This is
Mockingbird for a new generation," she added.

The novel was first published in 1960 and has sold more than 30
million copies. Along with J K Rowling and Ray Bradbury, Lee has
become yet another author who has relented on her previous pledge
to hold out on publishing her work digitally. In a letter to Oprah Winfrey in 2006, she wrote of her enduring
love of physical books in a world where everyone had "laptops, cell
phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms".

"And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a
computer?" she wrote. "Weeping for Anna Karenina and being
terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with
Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up -- some things
should happen on soft pages, not cold metal."

But on cold metal -- or plastic, more like -- the trial of Tom
Robinson and the adventures of Jem and Scout will now happen. As
one of many long-time fans of the novel, I couldn't be more pleased
that Lee has changed her mind -- not for myself, but for those who
are yet to discover the courageous, compassionate Finch family of
Maycomb, Alabama.

Last year Lee successfully sued her former literary agent,
Samuel Pinkus, in order to regain the rights to her novel after she
claimed he had "duped" her into signing them over. The idea that
she might have lost the copyright to her work within her lifetime
to someone who took advantage of her frail condition is upsetting.
It is the right and responsible thing for her to now allow it to be
published as an ebook. As with many much-loved novels, To Kill
A Mockingbird does not belong only to the author, but to its
fans. The book will survive Lee, and all of us who have already
read it, and will one day belong to a new set of readers.

It is understandable too that some people have not embraced and
perhaps will never embrace the digital publishing revolution. But
for the next generation of dedicated bookworms, picking up a Kindle
is likely to be as natural as picking a book off the shelf -- if
not more so. We cannot afford to let the defining stories of any
age vanish into obscurity because their authors do not personally
enjoy using certain platforms to access them. Other major works
still not available in digital format include The Catcher In
the Rye, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- the authors of
all of which are now dead.

While there is a strong sense of time and place within To
Kill A Mockingbird, it would be ignorant to think that the
racial injustice presented within the novel is no longer relevant
in society today. Similarly, while "phony" has slipped well out of
the contemporary teenage lexicon, The Catcher in the Rye's
Holden Caulfield remains an icon of youthful rebellion. It would be
shameful for anyone to deny the angsty teenagers of the future
their ultimate protagonist because he could not make the jump from
paper to screen. Cynical young Holden would no doubt decry that as
both "stupid" and "dumb".

The classics are called so because they do not lose their appeal
over time, or their ability to nourish the soul. And if time cannot
corrupt them, then the medium through which they are delivered will
not either. Let the novels live and let them be digested by those
who want to flick through their dog-eared pages, those who need to
download them in an unusual language and even those who cannot read
at all. Preservation of stories in their original form and the
delivery of them to new audiences is easier than it has been at any
point in history. That is a valuable thing, and one that we should
not take for granted.